Maybe all of that nonsense with the Thing hadn't been such a good idea, after all.... But all he wants to do is sleep. The sideroom is dark and quiet and he lies down, asleep almost instantly in the cocooning silence.

Hadn't there been silence? No, silence was a memory, and a vague one at that. His ears had been filled with screams for too long. Screams and the neverending taunts and imprecations and orders from the guards, the ceaseless drone of impersonal medical observation....

The endless sounds and words and music in his own head.

Voices fade in and out. Reality slides into a wobbling, choking, drowning semi-consciousness. The word 'seizure' had been mentioned enough times during these drownings to form an association.

Lucidity.

But can it really be called lucidity when dark is day and light is night? The screams and moans blend with the inner sounds and become a terrifyingly beautiful chorus of words in no language that anyone has ever spoken, and his head will fly apart, it will burst into a million pieces because the sound is too huge, and they can't hear it.

No, that isn't right. Of course they couldn't hear it, it was an hallucination.

Another seizure. Pain and lights and hmmm, interesting, and a dark place hardly larger than the shatterproof cube and still pain, but for some reason they mustn't see, mustn't know--and it's gone. Apart from the tests. Always the tests, they seem intent on taking a part of everything, with no anaesthetic, intent on bleeding him dry.

This Nexus truly was an unpredictable place, though he figured if anyone from fiction were to show up there, it would be the Doctor.

The guards at the run-down complex hadn't been the type worth interrogating. They wouldn't have known anything. Lan, he was assured, was safe and unharmed. Still, the circumstances worried V. Unlike the previous kidnapping--a lone superpowered individual acting on selfish desires--this one quite obviously had organisation written all over it.

After having wandered aimlessly, spoken with Some, eaten, slept, and wandered some more, V came to a decision.

So he turned on some quiet music or other and set about cooking. What resulted was a pasta concoction that most would agree upon as comforting in that way only pasta can acheive. Perhaps it's the carbohydrates.

He waited and when Meredith didn't appear, he made his way to her room, knocking softly on the door before entering with a bowl of said pasta and a mug of tea.

Only this morning I discovered a small snake near the portal I use to access the Nexus. He must have been cold, as snakes often are, as he was curled up completely on himself. I'd coaxed him out of the ball to discover that he was an apparently healthy and uninjured ball python. Apparently he's taken a liking to me, as he curls around various limbs.

Lan took a liking to him. I'm glad of that.

I think I shall keep him. Though I'd thought of many options, I'd decided to name him Gunpowder Treason. It stuck, you see.